KILMAHEW THEATRE

The following project is a proposal for the Kilmahew Theatre. The theatre is based in the abandoned concrete shell of Saint Peter’s Seminary, based Scotland. Saint Peter’s Seminary was built on the Kilmahew estate in 1961 by Architects Gillepsie, Kidd and Coia. It’s designed-use as a school for training catholic priest only lasted 19 years due to low admissions. The Catholic Church gave the abandoned site to the ‘Kilmahew Trust’ in 2021, who plan on creating a space for teaching and education, with a particular focus on performing arts and cinema. The proposed theatre’s organic fibre glass dome shape comes from a series of experimentations pictured on this webpage. The first experimentations being ‘scooping’ through volumes to create spaces and geometry within existing buildings fragments. The second experimentations being using inflatables to create space/boundaries within the existing fabric of a space. The Kilmahew Theatre focuses on performing arts and architecture education, connecting with existing universities and schools in Glasgow and the surrounding area. The theatre is designed to host events of up to 170 people, together with classroom spaces, backstage, light and sound engineering studios, practise spaces, workshops (to build stage sets and pavilions), a box office etc.